Month: August 2012

Superconductivity: From Feshbach to Fermi

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(This post is continued from this one.) After a bit of searching on Wikipedia, I found that the fundamental philosophical underpinnings of superconductivity were to be found in a statistical concept called the Feshbach resonance. If I had to teach superconductivity to those who only knew of the phenomenon superfluously, that’s where I’d begin. So. … Read more

The personal loss of a printed book

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Over the last few days, I’ve been getting the feeling that buying a Kindle is the best decision I’ve ever made. What I find unsettling, however, is that I don’t seem to miss printed books as much as I thought I would: the transition was so smooth that it might almost have been irreversible. It seems I fell in love with what the books had to say and not with the books themselves, a disengagement with the metaphysical form and a betrothal to its humble, degenerate function

The Markovian Mind

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In many ways, human engagement with information happens in such a manner that, with the accumulation of information over time, the dataset constructed out of the latest volume of information has the strongest relationship of any kind with the consecutively next dataset – a Markovian trait. At any point of time, the future state of … Read more

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Yaadhum oore, yaavarum kelir. On that note: Tata Photon, fuck you.

When must science give way to religion?

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When I saw an article titled ‘Sometimes science must give way to religion‘ in Nature on August 22, 2012, by Daniel Sarewitz, I had to read it. I am agnostic, and I try as much as I can to keep from attempting to proselyte anyone – through argument or reason (although I often fail at … Read more

Thinking quantum

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In quantum physics, every metric is conceived as a vector. But that’s where its relation with classical physics ends, makes teaching a pain. Teaching classical mechanics is easy because we engage with it every day in many ways. Enough successful visualization tools exist to do that. Just wondering why quantum mechanics has to be so … Read more

Getting started on superconductivity

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After the hoopla surrounding and attention on particle physics subsided, I realized that I’d been riding a speeding wagon all the time. All I’d done is used the lead-up to (the search for the Higgs boson) and the climax itself to teach myself something. Now, it’s left me really excited! Learning about particle physics, I’ve … Read more

Yes, I had $50.

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Last week, I paid $50 to sign up for entrepreneur Dalton Caldwell‘s new start-up App.net. I wouldn’t have found the service by myself until it’d have been too late for me to get on their bandwagon early – and getting early on a promising bandwagon is something I’ve always missed out on. So, on a … Read more

The marching coloumns

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Every day is a swing between highs and lows, and in the last two months that I’ve experienced them, they’ve never been periodic. Setting off the work, the mood depends on the weather: cloudy is good, buoyant, rain is more than welcome, but a clear, blue sky and a blazing fireball in the empyrean is … Read more

Building the researcher’s best friend

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One of the most pressing problems for someone conducting any research on personal initiative has to be information storage, access, and reproduction. Even if you’re someone who’s just going through interesting papers in pre-print servers and journals and want to quickly store text, excerpts, images, videos, diagrams, and/or graphs on the fly, you’ll notice that … Read more